


make the season bright

by Catja



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catja/pseuds/Catja
Summary: Bellamy and Clarke spend their first Christmas together as adults in a relationship.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kacka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/gifts).



> [edit here.](http://i.imgur.com/Vx4U6Vh.png) unbeta'd.

Clarke wakes up to Bellamy climbing into bed with her. It’s still dark out, so she burrows closer and presses her nose to his bare back. There’s something she’s forgetting, a nagging thought in her head, about him being here, but he’s _here_ , so Clarke ignores it, and lets herself fall asleep.

The second time Clarke wakes up, she’s alone. It takes her a few sleepy seconds to realize why that feels wrong, but as soon as she does she scrambles out of bed. She grabs her wand, out of habit, and throws the first article of clothing she sees— Bellamy’s sweater, she thinks— and out of their room to find him.

He’s not in the living room, though there’s a mountain of wrapped gifts that weren’t there when she went to sleep. They’re color coded by house, of course, the way Bellamy’s been wrapping them since their first year, before they became friends. All of his gifts had been in black and yellow that year, for his housemates, and one in red and gold for Octavia. The younger Blake hadn’t come to Hogwarts until their fourth year, but Bellamy had been pretty sure where the Sorting Hat would put her. 

This year, there’s a veritable rainbow under the tree. Most of them are red, of course, with a smattering of red and yellow, and only two in green. Clarke’s distracted by checking the tags— for Miller and Murphy, predictably book-shaped. Nothing for her, which _is_ surprising. The majority of Clarke’s gifts are for Bellamy. She prefers to think herself above house loyalties now, so she takes the opposite approach. All of her gifts are wrapped in plain brown paper, tied up with silver and gold ribbon. She does plan to cover the paper with drawings, if she has the time. Or inclination. 

Clarke finds him in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee in his hands. It requires actual effort _not_ to just leap into his arms. The hot beverage is a helpful deterrent. “I thought you weren’t supposed to get back until Saturday,” she says by way of greeting, leaning against the opposite counter to inspect him. He’s rather more freckled now, with longer hair and skin a shade or two darker than when he’d left six weeks ago. 

Bellamy smiles wide at the sight of her. “I pulled the _I have a dependent returning from Hogwarts_ card, got to take an earlier Portkey,” he says, looking her over in return. 

Clarke knows she’s probably lost a bit of weight, over the last couple of months. She’s in her year of observing at St. Mungo’s. The complicated and interesting cases tend to ignore her schedule. Bellamy hasn’t been here to make sure she’s properly fed and rested. Besides, she never sleeps well when he’s gone. Clarke’s aware that she looks a bit worse than the last time they were together. 

But still, Bellamy sets his mug on the counter and crosses their minuscule kitchen to gather her in his arms. “You look so good,” he murmurs into her hair. “Missed you so much.”

Clarke melts, a little. It’s still a bit unfamiliar, to have him like this. They’ve only been a couple for a few months, and most of that time has been spent apart. But they were roommates for two years before that, and best friends since they were second years, stuck in the Hospital Wing for a week after a potions accident they still blame each other for. She’s not used to being this close, getting to press her lips against his shoulder and fit her head under his chin, slip her hand under the back of his shirt to trace his spine. 

“Missed you too,” Clarke says, after a few moments, pulling away. She hasn’t had her fill of him, but she doubts she ever will. “Does your supervisor know that the dependent is of age, and is Apparating herself here from King’s Cross?” She pours herself some coffee and heads toward the sofa. 

Bellamy follows, as she knew he would, and settles himself on the sofa. “Pike doesn’t need to know. And I don’t know why she can’t just come straight here,” Bellamy grumbles. “No need to waste the day on the train. She’s right there!” he says, nodding toward the window behind them and its view of Hogwarts. 

Clarke leans against his side, pulling a blanket over her bare legs. She Summons one of her gifts and a marker Raven left the other day. She’d rather just bask in Bellamy’s warmth, but she feels much less guilty if she’s being productive. “You know why.” She checks the tag- it’s for her mother- and starts outlining snowflakes. Seasonal and inoffensive. “Octavia might be here already if you’d agreed to her bringing Lincoln along.”

“Why is it so bad to want my family to myself for a few days?”

Clarke’s hand stills. “Your family, huh?” She turns to look up at him; he’s staring over at the tree, a blush rising faintly on his cheeks. The evergreen is covered in candles, enchanted so they won’t be a fire hazard, but she saved the actual decorating for after Bellamy and Octavia returned. 

“Yea,” he says, gruff. “You- you know you are. You know you’re important to me.”

She forces herself to keep drawing, knowing how he hates for her to push when he says something like this. “Yeah, I know,” she says eventually.

Bellamy relaxes behind her. “Do you have to go in to the hospital today?” he asks.

Clarke rolls her eyes at the blatant subject change. “No, not until the fourth. Unless I have to go observe a delivery. Triplets, not due until February, but they’re likely to be early. I’m all yours.”

He makes a vague sound of agreement, or acknowledgement, and presses a kiss to the top of her head, then another. “Do you have to do this now?” His hand curls around her stomach, large and warm. 

“Not even a little.” She sets everything on the end table and lets herself be drawn back into their bedroom.

* * *

The best part of this particular holiday is that Clarke has, more or less, nothing to do.

Her mother and stepfather are with his family in Peru, so they’re not exchanging gifts until they return for the New Year. Raven and Gina are hosting the Christmas dinner, so all Clarke has to do is cross the street to their place over Raven’s cyber cafe. Octavia’s staying with them, but she floos down to Berkshire almost every day to see her boyfriend. It’s a far cry better than last year. Abby and Marcus got married New Year’s Eve, so the entire month of December was taken up by the wedding. Clarke hadn’t even bothered with a tree, since Bellamy still had his mother then to spend the holiday with.

So now Clarke’s determined to fit as many activities in this year as she can. It’s her first holiday as an adult, or the first one she’s had almost full control over. And Bellamy’s willing to let her take charge. 

In the three days between the Blake’s return and Christmas, Clarke sets Bellamy to Charm the windows to at least _look_ like there’s snow, and then to baking. Octavia’s willing to help decorate the tree, but after that she practically disappears, leaving a small pile of sloppily wrapped gifts behind. They spend an evening Apparating around, looking for the best light display. Clarke’s one disappointment about their flat (aside from the lack of storage in the kitchen, the lack of insulation in the bathroom, and the no-pets-other-than-owls policy) is that they can’t put up their own outdoor lights. 

Bellamy does put his foot down about ice skating, after a traumatic experience with the Giant Squid, so instead Clarke demands he conjure enough snow to have a real snowball fight. Octavia brings Lincoln along for that, Raven and Gina join in, and Clarke persuades Monty and Miller to floo up from London for the occasion. Bellamy divides them, naturally, along house lines: Ravenclaws and Slytherins against Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors, or, as Monty puts it, Heads versus Hearts. After a ferocious battle with no clear winner, they congregate at Raven’s cafe and drink a disgusting amount of hot chocolate. 

But Clarke runs out of wholesome winter activities by Christmas Eve.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Bellamy says. He’s lying on the couch, flipping idly through his sixth year History of Magic textbook. Bellamy claims it’s to find a particular reference to Castelobruxo’s founding, but Clarke’s pretty sure he wants to avoid helping her decorate.

Clarke’s sitting on the floor, cutting paper snowflakes and Charming them to float above them. Bellamy and Octavia had deemed the place sufficiently festive, but the Griffin family decorating rule was More is More. “It is! I have two more weeks off, Bellamy. What am I supposed to do for two weeks?”

“Relax? Enjoy your time off?” Bellamy closes the textbook and slides down to the floor beside Clarke. “Read a book that isn’t about the human body, or draw something that’s not a gift. Or spend time with your friends?” 

Clarke sends another snowflake toward the ceiling. It looks small. A little pathetic. She casts a quick Enlarging Charm on the next piece of paper and starts tracing a pattern. “I spent time with our friends yesterday, _and_ the day before,” she says. Clarke is perfectly aware that she’s whining, a bit. She’s more grateful that she and Bellamy have grown beyond him dismissing everything she says and calling her _princess._

Bellamy’s fingers curl around the back of her neck and tangle in her hair. “Spend time with me, then.”

“But I _have_ been spending time with you,” Clarke says, turning toward him, her wand and paper idle in her lap. “We’ve not spent more than ten minutes apart since you got back.”

His fingers start working into the knots in her neck. Clarke slumps against him, a little defeated. “Not really just us, though,” he says. “Not really.” 

Clarke can’t quite make out his tone. He doesn’t sound disappointed, exactly, but then Bellamy rarely does. “Okay, let’s spend time together.” 

He tilts her head back for a slow, sweet kiss. “Okay,” he agrees, his lips still mostly pressed against hers. “Just—hold on.” Bellamy stands, pulling her up with him. “This floor is terrible.” He stretches his shoulders out and groans.

“Old man,” Clarke says fondly, wrapping her arms around him. Hugging Bellamy is one of her favorite things, and has been since the first time she threw herself into his arms, fifth year. He’d had a bad fall during a Quidditch match, and Clarke panicked. Bellamy was barely hurt, but she still remembered the minutes she spent, absolutely terrified.

Really, it was amazing it took them as long as it did to get together.

“By three months,” Bellamy retorts, as he usually does. He pulls back then, to look at her, and he softens a little. “I know that you aren’t really good at relaxing—”

Clarke scoffs. “Like you are?”

“Okay, yeah. Neither of us are good at it, but I’ve got eight days left before I have to go back to Brazil. And I want to spend every minute with you that I can, and I don’t really want to be doing, well, whatever _activities_ you come up with the whole time.”

And it’s not like Clarke disagrees with any of that, so she nods. “So what do you want to do, then?” she asks.

“Honestly?”

Clarke gives him her best _don’t be stupid, Bellamy_ look.

“I could use a nap,” he admits. “I’m still on Amazon Time, mostly, and tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

So Bellamy stretches out on the couch, his head in Clarke’s lap so she can run her fingers through his hair. Clarke manages to finish a novel that her fellow trainee Maya Vie lent her in _April._ A couple hours later, when Octavia returns and wakes her brother, Clarke can admit that, yes, it was a rather nice way to spend an afternoon.

* * *

Christmas Day is rather more chaotic, even without hosting anyone or traveling any distance. Gina wants it to be a somewhat formal event; dinner’s only the five of them, but the rest of the group plans to stop in for the evening once they’re done with family events, and Gina, like Clarke, has been feeling a bit of pressure about moving from school get togethers to actual adult parties.

“Oh my god, Bell, why do I have to dress up? They’re _your_ friends.”

“If you wear dress robes you can put whatever you want underneath,” Clarke calls from the single bathroom. 

“No, actually you can’t,” Bellamy yells from the kitchen, where he’s finishing up his contribution to the meal. He’s already dressed in the only suit he has, purchased for his mother’s funeral and since spelled from black to a more festive forest green. 

“But then I’d be wearing _dress robes_.” Octavia pounds on the bathroom door. “You almost done, Clarke? The mirror out here doesn’t like me.”

“Maybe,” Bellamy says, “that’s because you refuse to dress appropriately.”

Octavia groans. “How is this inappropriate? It’s at _Raven’s,_ she’s probably wearing jeans and a bomber.”

Clarke grabs her jewelry and evacuates the bathroom, just in time to hear Bellamy say, “Not if Gina wants her to dress up.” He turns toward her, like he always does, eyes doing the usual once over. Not to ogle her, usually, just to check that she’s fine. “Can you?” Bellamy asks, nodding toward his sister. “I’ve got to—”

Clarke makes a shooing motion. “Go on, we’ve got this.” She smiles at Octavia, a little tightly, then groans. The expression felt like something her mother would do, when she’s pretending to get along with someone, which is generally the last thing Clarke wants. She _likes_ Octavia, has known her for seven years, and expects to know her for many more. 

“Oh, and you look gorgeous, babe!” Bellamy calls from the kitchen. Clarke looks down at her dress. It’s black, and a little plain, but in a flattering cut. More importantly, it has pockets, and it lets her pick any accessories she wants. Tonight, she’s got a rather ridiculous pair of sparkly, strappy gold pumps, and pearls from her grandmother. 

“Nice save!” Octavia calls back, then follows Clarke back into her bedroom— really part guest room, part art studio, part library for all the old books Bellamy refuses to get rid of, even with his access to Gringotts’ library. They manage to get Octavia acceptably dressed without too much fuss— they compromise on a skirt, shorter and tighter than Clarke would like, and a sweater, more conservative than Octavia would like. 

“Did you notice that you and Bell are wearing each others’ house colors?” Octavia asks as Clarke charms her hair into curls, and then into a chignon.

Clarke shakes her head, carefully, to make sure her braided crown won’t fall apart. “No, because I never spent my Hogwarts career thinking about houses first.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Sure it is. I slept in the Slytherin dungeon, and always had other Slytherins in classes, but who were my friends? Who did I spend time with?” Clarke tries to hide a grimace. She feels almost as if she’s lecturing Octavia, which is not exactly what she wants to be doing. “Most of the time I was with Hufflepuffs, or Ravenclaws. Bellamy, Wells, Raven, Monty,” she lists. “Some Slytherins, but not just.” Clarke shrugs. “And now, I spend all my time around other Healers, and we all wear the same, _terrible_ lime green robes. I don’t even know what houses most of the Healers are in.” 

Octavia’s silent for a minute, though Clarke isn’t sure if she’s considering what Clarke said, or just not sure how to respond. “No Gryffindors?” she asks eventually.

Clarke has to think about that. “Never really close to any Gryffindors, actually.” She buys herself a moment by spraying both of them, rather aggressively, with a hair setting potion. “Most Gryffindors I hung out with were friends of friends, I guess. Jasper, Harper. Gina, but I only spent time with her after we left Hogwarts. I dated one, sixth year. You,” she offers, giving Octavia one last smile in the mirror. “But we’d better get going.”

Dinner is a rather relaxed affair, despite the dress code. Clarke’s a little awkward around Gina, as usual— the girl Bellamy dated the summer after their sixth year, after her dad and Wells both died and she avoided everyone else she knew— but Raven, as usual, acts like there’s nothing weird, at all, about a dinner party with Bellamy, three women he’s slept with, and his sister. Octavia is unusually quiet, but Gina’s good at drawing her out. The large pot of mulled wine Gina made helps, even the small amount that Bellamy lets Octavia have.

After dinner, the rest of the group start to trickle in. But it’s not until Monty and Miller arrive, coming from the first joint holiday with both sets of parents, though, that anything exciting happens.

“Guess who said yes!” Monty said, as soon as he’s made it through the door, Miller following closely behind him. “It’s Nate. Nate said yes.” Sure enough, there’s a plain silver band around Miller’s finger, and the widest smile Clarke’s ever seen on his face.

A flurry of congratulations follows, and the proposal story is (Monty on his knees in the middle of an ice rink the night before, with a romantic speech he could barely get out, and Jasper hiding in the crowd to take some photographs) told and retold with every new guest. 

“Who’s gonna be next?” Octavia asks, after a celebratory shot of firewhisky. “Hmm? Taking your bets now on the next engagement here.”

“Okay, O, you can go to Lincoln’s now,” Bellamy said, slinging his arm around her neck affectionately. “You’ve convinced me.” 

Octavia plants a smacking kiss on his cheek and calls out a “Thanks, love you big brother, bye, don’t wait up!” before making her escape. 

But Bellamy doesn’t make eye contact with Clarke again, which is about half an hour longer than usual, and Clarke doesn’t get a chance to talk to him until they’ve left.

“You okay?” she asks, tucking herself under his arm for the quick walk back across the road. The temperature has dropped, and it feels like it might even snow. 

“Yeah, just— weird. That we’re old enough to have friends getting married.” 

“Jasper proposed to Maya before we even finished school,” Clarke counters. She steals Bellamy’s wand from his sleeve and casts a quick _Alohomora_ on their front door. She doubts that she could manage a more difficult spell with his wand, but it’s a comfort that it works for her, at least that much. “Of course,” she adds, toeing her shoes off, “she said no, and they’re not even dating anymore, but still. And my parents got married right out of school. So did Miller’s.” 

Bellamy shrugs out of his suit jacket. “Sure, and mine never got married, and my grandparents didn’t get married until my mother was six. It’s less common in the Muggle world. Getting married at twenty, twenty-one, is considered young.”

“You know,” Clarke says, carefully, standing in front of Bellamy so he could undo her hair, “honestly, I wasn’t sure if you were going to propose this morning. There wasn’t anything under the tree, so…” She can feel herself blushing, and she’s glad her back is to him.

Bellamy had given her Portkey tickets, so she could visit him during his next few months of on-site training. Clarke was thrilled with the gift, really, just unsure if the tightness in her chest was relief or disappointment.

“Did you- did you want me too?” Bellamy’s hands still in her hair. “Should I have?” 

One of his hands drifts down to her shoulder. Clarke presses a kiss to his knuckles and turns around so she can look at him. 

“Bellamy, we’ve only been dating for a few months. Proposing would be a bit—” she laughs, nervously, her fingers tangling in his curls. “I love you.” Clarke presses a kiss to his lips, quick and reassuring. “I wasn’t expecting it, or hoping for it. If you asked— I don’t want to marry anyone who isn’t you. But I don’t need to be engaged, or married, to know that I love you, and I want to be with you, and I’m so _happy_ with you.” Clarke takes a deep breath, feeling suddenly awkward. Impassioned speeches are usually Bellamy’s thing, not hers. But sometimes Bellamy needs to hear one too. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Bellamy agrees. He nudges his forehead against hers. “Let me know if you change your mind.” 

“You’ll be the first to know.”


End file.
